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I picked up this interesting article on Media control from http://pilger.carlton.com/media, its about how the media can hurt normal people. Long but worth the read.
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'A CULTURAL CHERNOBYL'
John Pilger's exposes are not just limited to the clandestine operations of international governments. Not even his own profession can escape the same ruthless treatment as many a Western politician. In this section, taken from a chapter of his most recent book Hidden Agendas, Pilger unveils how editorial content is often governed by the immoral motives of media moguls and how those distorted truths can have devastating effects of the lives of everyday people.
"There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and morepower. All the rest is meaningless."
Napoleon Bonaparte
Eddie Spearitt and his son, Adam, went to a football game in Sheffield on April 15, 1989. They had been caught in trafficband had just enough time to find places in the allotted Liverpool terraces at Hillsborough stadium. Adam was fourteen and a devoted Liverpool supporter; and this was a critical FA
Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.
'We were so excited,' said Eddie. 'It was only when the crowd in the pen really began to build up that I got frightened.' The ancient turnstiles became a bottle-neck as 5,000 Liverpool fans sought to gain entrance before the kick-off.
When the police eventually opened the main gates, instead of directing the fans to the open terraces, they sent them into the crowded pen. Eddie and Adam were crushed in each other's arms. Adam was one of ninety-six fans who died.
The subsequent inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor left no doubt where the blame lay. 'The real cause of the Hillsborough disaster', he said in his report, 'was overcrowding… the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.' By the following Tuesday, the editor of the Sun, Kelvin
MacKenzie, had convinced himself that the tragedy had been
caused by Liverpool 'football hooligans'.
When he sat down to design his front page, he scribbled 'THE TRUTH' in huge letters. Beneath it he wrote three subsidiary headlines: 'Some fans picked pockets of victims' … 'Some fans urinated on the brave cops' … 'Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life'.
The story described how 'drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims' and 'police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon'. A dead girl was abused and fans, said an unnamed policeman, 'were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead'. A Tory MP, whose sole source was the
police, was quoted.
None of it was true. There was no hooliganism. People were vomiting and behaving strangely because they had been crushed and traumatised. Others died because senior police officers failed to understand that the fans inside the pen were fighting for their lives, not trying to 'invade' the pitch.
'THE TRUTH' was the opposite. Like much in MacKenzie's Sun, it
was clearly intended to pander to prejudice. Other journalists
on the Sun appeared to know this instinctively. 'As
MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people,' wrote
Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie in their history of the
Sun, 'a collective shudder ran through the office [but]
MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in
the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch.
[Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the
headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring
them in the face was too glaring … It obviously wasn't a silly
mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any
comment on it - they just took one look and went away shaking
their heads in wonder at the enormity of it … It was a
"classic smear".'
I met Eddie Spearitt and two other Hillsborough parents: Phil
Raymond, whose son Philip, also aged fourteen, died, and Joan
Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher, twenty-six, and
Kevin, sixteen. We sat with coffee and sandwiches in a large
sunlit room in the Philharmonic pub, which overlooks
Liverpool.
Those who try to justify the substitution of a free press with a circus press that speaks to prejudice and 'gives people what they want', might listen to Eddie and Phil and Joan.
'As I lay in my hospital bed,' Eddie said, 'the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It's bad enough when you lose your fourteen-year-old son because you're treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I've had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the
Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During thirty-one days of Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life.'
Joan Traynor said that ITN had asked permission to film the funeral of her two sons. She refused and asked for her family's privacy to be respected. The Sun invaded the funeral, with photographers shooting from a wall. The picture of her sons' coffins on the front page of a paper that had lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that, eight years later, she has difficulty speaking about it. 'Is that what a newspaper is meant to do?' she asked.
Phil Hammond said, 'Like Eddie, the family kept the papers away from me. I've still got the papers in a white nylon bag in the loft. Take one of the Sun's lies; they said fans were robbing watches and money from the dead laid out on the pitch. I'm the secretary of the Family Support Group and every family has been in touch with me about that accusation. All of them have accounted for the possessions of their loved ones. Nothing was stolen.
[The Sun said] that fans were urinating on the bodies. We got all the clothes back; they hadn't been washed; none of them smelt of urine. But some mud sticks, doesn't it, and there is always someone willing to pass it on. The Sun hurt us, and hurt us badly. We've had to defend the name of our loved ones when all they did was go to a football match and never come back.'
In the days that followed the tragedy, Billy Butler, a popular Radio Merseyside disc jockey, became a voice for Liverpool's grief and anger. 'There were newsagents calling in,' he told me, 'assuring people they would not stock the Sun. They were writing on their windows, "We do not have the Sun here". There was a public burning of the Sun in Kirkby. Caller after caller said they were boycotting the paper, and the boycott is still going on today. It's a marvellous way that ordinary people have to show their power, and this city used it."
Unlike the homes of the Hillsborough families, Kelvin MacKenzie's suburban home was not 'staked out' by a press mob. His chauffeured Jaguar routinely collected him every morning and took him to the Murdoch fortress at Wapping, east London, where, surrounded by razor wire and guards, he caught the lift to his windowless office and did not leave until the Jaguar took him home again.
However, sales of the Sun on Merseyside were falling fast, down by almost 40 per cent, a loss that would cost News International an estimated ?10 million a year. When the Press Council subsequently condemned the Sun's lies, and the boycott intensified, Murdoch ordered MacKenzie to respond publicly. BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend was chosen as his platform. The 'sarf London' accent that was integral to MacKenzie's persona as an 'ordinary punter' was now a contrite middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4.
'It was my decision', said MacKenzie, 'and my decision alone to do that front page in that way, and I made a rather serious error.' In 1996 MacKenzie was back on Radio 4, this time in a very different mood. 'The Sun did not accuse anybody of anything,' he said aggressively. 'We were the vehicle for others ?'
The Sun's treatment of the Hillsborough tragedy was typical not only of its record of distortion, but of its cruelty. The rich and famous have been able to defend themselves with expensive libel actions; the singer Elton John won damages, before appeal, of ?1 million following a series of character assassinations. But most of the Sun's victims are people like the Hillsborough parents, who have had to suffer without recourse. Turn the pages of back copies of the Sun and the pattern is clear. Here are a few examples taken at random.
A man who had undergone a heart transplant operation was vilified across several pages for having left his wife fifteen years earlier. This was published while his recovery was in the balance. People who perform exceptional public duty and are celebrated as popular heroes for rescuing somebody or tackling a criminal are ritually 'knocked down' when something in their private lives is revealed. They are then branded 'love cheats' and 'rats'.
Minorities are a favourite target. A bishop was vilified for being gay, a lesbian for being 'unfit' to care for children. Racial stereotypes are routinely promoted; an Asian in the 'soap' EastEnders was defamed as 'small, greasy and cheap'.
A Sun editorial about Australia's bicentenary celebrations, headlined, 'THE ABOS: BRUTAL AND TREACHEROUS', was described by the Press Council as 'inaccurate, unjustified and unacceptably racist'.
The disabled are mawkishly pitied; Simon Weston, the soldier who suffered terrible burns in the Falklands War, was the subject of a faked 'interview', which invited readers' revulsion for his disfigurement.
The disabled are mawkishly pitied; Simon Weston, the soldier who suffered terrible burns in theFalklands War, was the subject of a faked 'interview', which invited readers' revulsion for his disfigurement.
Unlike journalists, politicians are said to be 'fair game' if they are found to be hypocrites. The Labour politician Tony Benn is not a hypocrite, but his principles are anathema to Murdoch. Benn was declared 'insane' in a malicious Sun story whose 'authority', an American psychologist, described the false quotations attributed to him as 'absurd'.
The Thatcher Government's campaign against 'loony' London councils, which probably helped turn the Labour Party in on itself and away from progressive policies, was based substantially on a long-running series of inventions and distortions in the Sun.
The person ultimately responsible for this is Rupert Murdoch. More than any proprietor since Lord Beaverbrook, Murdoch prides himself on his ability to choose the right people to edit his newspapers. He remains in close contact with all of them.
Kelvin MacKenzie was his 'favourite editor'. Under MacKenzie, the profits from the Sun allowed Murdoch to build his television empire. Murdoch personally approved, or approved of, much of MacKenzie's unscrupulous behaviour, such as the 'GOTCHA' headline.
When journalists on The Times, sister paper to the Sun, expressed their concern about the damage done to the paper's reputation by the publication of the bogus Hitler Diaries, Murdoch replied, 'After all, we are in the entertainment business.'
The ethos Murdoch wanted to build in his papers was demonstrated early in his career. In 1964, his Sydney tabloid, the Daily Mirror, published the diary of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl under the headline, 'WE HAVE SCHOOLGIRL'S ORGY DIARY'. A thirteen-year-old boy, who was identified, was expelled from the same school. Shortly afterwards, he hanged himself from his mother's clothesline. The girl was subsequently examined by a doctor from the Child Welfare Department and found to be a virgin. The 'diary' was the product of a fertile adolescent imagination.
Richard Neville, one of the editors of Oz, went to see the boy's family and was moved by their grief, and angered by the circumstances of his death. 'It seemed', he wrote in his autobiography, '[that some] publishers could get away with murder ? or almost.' Neville later confronted Murdoch with the consequence of his newspaper's behaviour and was told, 'Everybody makes mistakes.'
In the very few interviews he allows, Murdoch is often defensive about the product that has built his multi-billion-dollar empire. In 1967, on the eve of his departure for Fleet Street, he told ABC Television in Sydney, 'I'm not ashamed of any of my newspapers at all, and I'm rather sick of snobs who tell us they're bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants, who call themselves liberals or radicals and want to impose their taste on the community.'
In London, Murdoch encouraged this view of himself as an 'outsider' persecuted by 'snobs'. These 'snobs' would later include the House of Commons and the broadcasting regulatory authorities, which consistently denied him access to British television.
Murdoch himself came from an Anglocentric elite. He went to the most exclusive 'public school' in Australia, Geelong Grammar (Prince Charles was sent there), then to Oxford. His parents' numerous establishment connections were available to him. His mother, Dame Elisabeth, a wealthy dowager, has long bestowed her patronage on a range of cultural interests. There can be little doubt that she would find a paper like the Sun abhorrent, as would Murdoch's wife, Anna, a devout Roman Catholic.
Murdoch's American biographer, Thomas Kiernan, is one of the few outside his circle who has known him personally. His book Citizen Murdoch, was written with the co-operation of Murdoch and his family and friends.
'The contrast between the private Murdoch and the business Murdoch is quite astounding,' Kiernan told me. 'I used to play tennis with him quite often and for someone who publicly is so anti-elite, he is very elitist in his manner. In his office, he is like a field-marshal: demanding, abrupt, short-tempered. But in his private life he maintains very high standards and has rigid values, high values, and demands that his children and his friends keep to these. On the other hand, in the media, he destroys standards. This has long been true of his newspapers. The infection is insidious. Even the New York Times will quote the Star, a supermarket tabloid he started, and one of America's two main sleaze merchants. The Star may well have got the story from the Sun, and around the Murdoch circuit it will go, and before you know it, some awful fiction becomes received truth. Now it's television's turn and the danger is already there.
'In the United States he has a lot of direct influence in the programming of his Fox network, which relies on sleaze. He already has turned news into entertainment, with paparazzi with video cameras chasing celebrities down the street: that's basically a Murdoch invention in the US. Those who run TV news fear they're going to have to go downmarket even more than they have, just to keep up with Murdoch. It's as if everything he touches becomes desensitised, like the horror displayed every day on his front pages; after a while, we get used to it.
'Now set that against his private life where the influence of his wife, Anna, is very important. When I was close to both of them, she was very critical of what he was doing. When he turned the New York Post into a version of the Sun, he did so without Page Three Girls, because his wife put her foot down and told him she didn't want their three young children walking past news-stands and seeing the topless girls on their dad's paper. She didn't want them to suffer at school or the family to have social disapprobation as they established themselves in New York.'
Reiner Luyken, a prize-winning journalist on the respected German newspaper Die Zeit, has reported from Britain for almost twenty years. He is the author of a series of perceptive articles about Murdoch's impact in Britain, entitled 'A Cultural Chernobyl'. 'The most striking effect of Murdoch is self-censorship,' he wrote. 'Self-censorship is now so com-monplace in the British media, that journalists admit to it without blushing.'
We met outside the gates of Murdoch's headquarters at Wapping, which Luyken called 'a journalistic penitentiary' and a 'new brave new world'. 'If you look closely at this place,' he said, 'if you look at the electronic bars, the wire on the perimeter, the patrolling guards, you must ask yourself, "How can information and ideas flow freely in such a place?"
Wapping is a factory for making money, yet it has become a kind of media model. Whether you read the Daily Mirror or the Telegraph or turn on the BBC, you get the feeling that the purpose of the enterprise of journalism has been turned on its head and the new ethic is that journalism is a commodity, purely to generate money. This is the Murdoch effect. Wapping is a cultural Chernobyl, spewing its poison across the whole journalistic landscape.'
The experience of Murdoch's 'new brave new world' leaves many of the journalists on his papers with an abiding ambivalence about him. Some will insist they were never told what to do, that there was never a 'line' - when the truth is that it was never necessary to tell them: they knew and accepted what was required of them.
Roy Greenslade, a critic of Murdoch, was Kelvin MacKenzie's number two on the Sun. 'As a young man,' wrote Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie, '[Greenslade] had embraced revolutionary Maoism. In his early days he had been a militant in the National Union of Journalists Chapel ? But he had watered down his politics to the point where he could take a senior job on the avowedly Thatcherite Sun with few qualms.'
Greenslade was a witness to many of MacKenzie's 'triumphs', such as his jingoistic fabrication of much of the Falklands War coverage. When MacKenzie called on his staff to cross the picket line representing the 5,900 printers, secretaries, librarians and cleaners sacked by Murdoch in 1986, Greenslade crossed it.
In 1995, no longer employed by Murdoch, Greenslade mounted a devastating attack on the ethos of Wapping, writing one of the most cogent explanations for the success of the Sun:
Murdoch had seized the time [he wrote], the old values of a discredited Establishment were crumbling. An energetic working class had cast off deference as an aberration of generations past. Television was god ? What was once said only in the pub or the intimacy of your bedroom would be published in your soaraway Sun [which] latched on to the permissiveness of the age.
Then, as the years passed, it perverted that ethos of liberalism for its own ends. It cultivated sex, yet decried sexual licence in its leading articles. It lured readers to play bingo for huge prizes while lecturing them on the vice of a something-for- nothing society.
It encouraged people to sell their sexual secrets while holding them up to ridicule. It cultivated the shallow world of celebrity as a cynical circulation device. It pushed back the boundaries of taste and decency while wringing its hands at the decline of standards. It employed the language of the lager lout while lambasting the growth of youth culture.
Its politics were opportunistic, conjoining the radical and the reactionary to extol the virtues of Margaret Thatcher, the supreme mistress of cultural philistinism. Greenslade called this 'the degradation of the newspaper form [in which] the old notion of a public service press was replaced by newspapers as machines of private profit'. He described the scramble among broadsheets as well as tabloids, to ape the 'sales-winning formula ? accommodating the cult of celebrity, games and television promotions [in which] sleaze is a national pastime, tackiness is stylish, the lowest common denominator is the bottom line. And the bottom line is all that counts ?'
Greenslade told me his article (in the Literary Review) was 'a recognition that much of what I took part in was wrong'. 'You're fired up by taking part in the technical process of producing a newspaper,' he said. 'It's like the way [Nazi] Germany was ? when you're taking part in the technical process, you are blinded in many ways to what you're actually doing. You're so worried about the next story, the next feature, filling that page and so on, that the overall thing eludes you ?It isn't as bad as Germany was, but I do think that you divide labour in the way they did and you do your own little bit ?'
Greenslade met Murdoch on several occasions. 'He's not the Dirty Digger figure he's painted,' he said. 'He's an educated person. I found him to be a totally rational person, not just in financial terms but in the sort of questions he asked: "Will this sell? Should we give them more sports? Have we any sex surveys?" He asked questions in such a way that you didn't actually think of the connotations ? but when it got to politics, well ?
'There was a dinner in London around the time the Berlin Wall came down, and Murdoch was utterly defiant, saying we in the West must keep a grip on the nuclear weaponry. You had right-wing executives of the Sunday Times arguing that there ought to be some kind of peace dividend, and he was saying, "No, no" and all the time quoting someone he called his "political adviser ?" When he was asked who this was, he replied, "Richard Nixon ?" '
In David Hare's play about the press, Pravda, the Murdoch figure, Lambert Le Roux, comments, 'Upmarket, down-market, it's all the same stuff!' In the play's final line, Le Roux is clearly referring to Wapping when he says, 'Welcome to the foundry of lies.' One of Murdoch's achievements has been to instil the same values throughout most of his organisation, in Britain and across the world, especially in his tabloid and broadsheet newspapers which are produced side by side at Wapping.
Murdoch acquired The Times and the Sunday Times in 1981 after long and agonised negotiations during which he agreed to the appointment of 'independent directors' on the board of Times Newspapers. He also gave 'personal guarantees' that he would not interfere in the editorial content of either paper. The whole performance lacked only the arrival of the March Hare.
While dispensing these 'guarantees' to politicians and the Great and the Good, Murdoch told Thomas Kiernan, 'One thing you must understand, Tom. You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear, and once the deal is done you don't worry about it. They're not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said was not what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they're made to look bad, and they can't abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.'
And so it came to pass. John Biffen, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the Thatcher Government, decided not to refer Murdoch's bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, despite the commission's rule that a company owning a newspaper with a circulation of more than half a million had to be thoroughly investigated before it could acquire another paper. An exception could be made only if it looked like the newspaper up for sale might otherwise close down. Certainly The Times was not financially secure, but the Sunday Times was profitable and had the prospect of making a lot of money. However, Biffen accepted highly contentious figures that 'proved' the Sunday Times was a loss-maker. His decision was made all the more remarkable by the fortune the paper has since delivered unerringly to Murdoch.
Just as this was about to be contested in court, Murdoch offered further 'guarantees' of editorial independence, this time to the journalists. He accompanied this with a 'warning' that the present owners would close the papers unless he bought them.
'At one stage during the battle for Times Newspapers,' wrote Christopher Hird and his co-authors in Murdoch: The Great Escape, 'a member of the staff consortium trying to buy the Sunday Times rang an old friend working as an adviser to Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. Playing on the government's apparent commitment to competition, he urged a halt to the Murdoch takeover. He was told to stop wasting his time. "You don't realise, she likes the guy." '
When the takeover came to be discussed by a Cabinet committee, Thatcher chaired the meeting. Murdoch was, in effect, being rewarded for his papers' 'years of loyal support'. The result, as Michael Leapman wrote, 'was a no-contest takeover [with] all the external appearances of an establishment "fix" of the kind Murdoch affects to despise.' His mother, Dame Elisabeth, told the BBC, 'Britain will perhaps learn to know that he's a pretty good chap.'
Unlike the unpretentious Sun, the Sunday Times from time to time carries serious journalism, even genuine scoops, although these are sometimes difficult to discern from journalism that appears serious.
Since Murdoch acquired it, the Sunday Times has borne much of the burden of the promotion of his interests and ambitions. In the 1980s, the paper consistently attacked the BBC and ITV, which were seen as obstacles to Murdoch's frustrated television plans in Britain. He made the editor, Andrew Neil, head of his satellite television company, Sky. Described as 'cross-fertilising' by a Murdoch executive, this has long been a feature of the Murdoch press all over the world.
In Neil's 470-page book, Full Disclosure, arguably one of the most sustained boasts in autobiographical history, the author devotes fewer than thirty words to the Sunday Times's most notorious, scurrilous and destructive smear campaign - against the journalists and broadcasters who made the 1988 current affairs programme, Death on the Rock, for Thames Television.
This investigation was highly significant because it lifted a veil on the British secret state and revealed its ruthlessness under Thatcher. In describing how an SAS team had gone to Gilbraltar and murdered four unarmed members of the IRA, the message was clear: the British Government was willing to use death squads abroad in its pursuit of the war in Ireland.
Death on the Rock also posed a threat to the political and media consensus on the war in the north of Ireland, and Margaret Thatcher did not forgive Thames Television for its transgression. Having frequently attacked the ITV 'monopoly' in commercial television, her echoes of Murdoch were vociferously covered in the Sunday Times. When the govern-ment rounded on Thames for what it called the 'distortions' of Death on the Rock, the Sunday Times appeared only too willing to give vast amounts of space to a series of wholly spurious, politically motivated charges.
An eye-witness to the murders, Carmen Proetta, who appeared in the programme, described how she saw two unarmed people shot at close range and offering no resistance. They had their hands in the air, either in an act of surrender or in reaction to the shootings. She heard no warning. The Murdoch press, in company with most of Fleet Street, subjected her to a torrent of lies and personal abuse. She was falsely accused of being involved in vice and drugs and of being 'anti-British'. The Sun described her as 'The Tart of Gib'. The Sunday Times coverage was different in one respect only: there was more of it.
Of over ?300,000 in libel damages eventually paid to Carmen Proetta, more than half was paid by the Sunday Times in an out-of-court settlement. According to the producer of Death on the Rock, Roger Bolton, one of the reasons Andrew Neil decided to settle was that 'on the first day in court a former journalist for the Sunday Times was ready to give evidence about the way her copy, sent from Gibraltar, was misrepresented by Mr Neil's editors'.2 3 In a memorandum sent to the features editor Robin Morgan, the reporter, Rosie Waterhouse, accused her own paper of being 'wide open to accusations that we had set out to prove one point of view and misrepresented and misquoted interviews to fit - the very accusations we were levelling at Thames'. She later resigned.
An inquiry conducted by a former Tory minister, Lord Windlesham, vindicated the programme's accuracy and integrity. The Sunday Times's branch of the National Union of Journalists called for an inquiry into the paper's role in the affair, specifically Andrew Neil's. There was none. Under the new system of allocating ITV franchises instituted by Thatcher, Thames, one of the most innovative of the major companies, lost its licence to broadcast.
'From the start,' wrote Hugo Young, political editor of the Sunday Times when Murdoch took it over, 'the omens were bad. During their first visits to the building, Murdoch and his associates made clear their hostility to Sunday Times journalism and their contempt for those who practised it. The journalists collectively were stigmatised as lead-swinging, expense-padding, layabout Trotskyites. Each of these epithets was uttered in my hearing by senior Murdoch executives. The political label was especially emphatic, wholly removed though it was from reality. Reports from El Salvador which allowed for any possibility that US foreign policy was in error were clearly potent evidence that the Commies had the Sunday Times in their grip.'
Once acclaimed for its journalistic and political independence, the Sunday Times was quick to reflect its master's world view. The largest rally ever staged by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which drew as many as half a million people, was dismissed beneath the headline, 'SUNSET FOR CND'. Coverage of the 1984-5 coal strike was crudely slanted to depict the miners as violent, intransigent and at odds with their leaders, an 'enemy within': the essential elements of the government's propaganda.
To the Sunday Times, wrote Hugo Young, 'the strike was a Marxist plot'. The paper's international coverage was reduced to that of 'a mid-Atlantic cheerleader'.26 A published interview with Ronald Reagan bore striking similarity to a Sun 'exclusive': that is, it never took place. Salman Rushdie, in hiding and threatened with assassination by an Iranian fatwa, was subjected to a front-page, personalised, one-sided, Sun-style attack by his estranged wife.
Michael Foot, the former leader of the Labour Party, was accused, across the front page, of being a 'KGB spy', an 'exclusive' which was followed by the announcement that Foot was to be paid 'substantial damages': a familiar post-script to 'investigations' that had once been the paper's pride. No corner of the Sunday Times has escaped contamination. In a section entitled 'Culture', a television reviewer, Adrian Gill, unleashed a stream of gratuitous abuse about a documentary I had made on the Murdoch effect on Fleet Street and the Daily Mirror in particular. As part of his 'review', Murdoch's man viciously attacked the retired Daily Mirror writer and critic Donald Zec, whom he accused of breaking into Marilyn Monroe's home in the 1950s. Soon afterwards, Gill's page was dominated by the standard Sunday Times apology and retraction.
In the 'Style' section there was a regular feature, 'Relationship of the Week', in which Chrissy Iley, photo-graphed in a shiny black coat, sneered and speculated about a chosen couple, quoting hearsay about them. Mysteriously, it disappeared one Sunday and never came back. In the same week, Murdoch was named 'Humanitarian of the Year' by the United Jewish Appeal Foundation in New York. His award was presented to him by Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contri-bution to 'peace' in Vietnam, the great American satirist Tom Lehrer said he was retiring because, clearly, satire was now obsolete. The 'Humanitarian of the Year' reaffirmed this.28 Murdoch's move to the 'new brave new world' at Wapping took place on January 24, 1986. Virtually overnight, more than 5,000 employees were abandoned. The print unions, Kelvin MacKenzie told Sun journalists, 'haven't got us by the balls any more'.
In exploiting resentment of the unions' power and abuses, such as the 'wildcat' stoppages that had lost millions of newspapers, and the 'Spanish practices' that allowed some people to pick up two pay packets, Murdoch was able to persuade most of his journalists to go to Wapping. For many, this came as a welcome justification; for while there was truth in many of the stories about the unions, it was also true that newspaper managements operated their own corruption - on perks alone - and it suited them to look the other way.
In my experience, the majority of compositors, linotype operators, machine-room workers and others were honest people who worked hard in antiquated, filthy and often dangerous conditions, especially in the old Sun and News of the World headquarters in Bouverie Street. They were paid well compared with other workers; and in scandalously low-paid Britain that fact was enough to make them enemies.
In 1985, Brenda Dean was appointed General-Secretary of SOGAT, representing the industry's clerical and ancillary workers. 'It's time the myths surrounding Wapping were swept away,' she told me. 'The first thing Murdoch made clear to me was that if I could deliver an agreement on new levels of manning, he could do business with the unions. Of course there was some resistance to new technology. But this came from people who had worked in the industry all their lives and were not permanent employees. Quite a few had no pension provision. If they lost their jobs they wouldn't get other employment. They wanted to know what was in it for them. But there is a world of difference between that view and saying we couldn't conclude a deal. We could. The great majority wanted agreement. There is no doubt about that.'
The unions had already successfully negotiated a comprehensive agreement with the new chief executive of the Daily Mirror, Clive Thornton. Staffing would be reduced, new technology introduced and no strike action would be taken for three years. In seeking a similar deal with Murdoch, the unions were told that News International planned to produce a new paper, the London Post, at Wapping. The unions by and large welcomed this and put forward their proposals for an 'all-in new technology deal'.
On January 2, 1986, Tony Britton, the assistant general manager of News Group Newspapers Limited, publishers of the Sun and the News of the World, wrote to Tony Isaacs, the senior machine-room union official, 'The company has agreed [to the union's proposals] ? and has given assurances that no regular employee need make himself available for volun-tary redundancy.' To which Isaacs replied, 'It is with pleasure that I can advise you that my Chapel [has] accepted Manage-ment's proposals that embrace the [Wapping] plant.'
Unknown to Dean, Isaacs or any other union official, Murdoch had been secretly moving non-union staff into Wapping for months and was discussing with his senior executives how they could sack the thousands who had been given 'assurances' that their jobs were secure. In a letter to News International managing director Bruce Mathews, Geoffrey Richards, the senior solicitor advising Murdoch, proposed precisely how they might 'dispense with the work-forces'. 'The cheapest way', he wrote, 'would be to dismiss employees while participating in a strike . . . The idea is to catch as many employees in the net as possible and it seems to me this will be done best if the dismissals take place at the weekend ?'
What he was saying was that, under Thatcher's new anti-trade union laws, workers who struck during 'negotiations' could be sacked instantly and would lose their redundancy entitlements: a huge saving to the company. There was no longer any mention of the London Post, which began to sound more and more mythical, a ploy for the 'real game', as Murdoch insiders called the trap being set.
'We were tricked,' said Brenda Dean. 'We had agreements that were at the point of being signed and the management suddenly were holding off signing them. We had even agreed to a third redundancies in some areas.' In fact, Dean had conceded more than any Fleet Street General-Secretary previously had dared to. Tony Dubbins, of the National Graphical Association, which represented typesetters, had gone even further by agreeing the principle of direct computerised type-setting by journalists at Wapping, although it effectively undermined the very existence of his union.
Only signatures were needed. The stalling continued as Murdoch's men waited for the signal to implement 'Project 800', a top-secret plan described by Murdoch at a meeting of his executives in New York as 'our dash for freedom'.32 When the unions finally realised they had been tricked and their agreements were worthless, they called a ballot and went on strike. 'We had given him an olive branch', said Dubbins, 'and he'd broken it in two and beat us around the head with it.'
As 'negotiations' technically were still in progress, the workforce could be dismissed without compensation. Thus, almost 5,500 people were sacked, many of them lifelong employees. 'I feel deeply and personally bitter', said Dean, 'on behalf of the thousands of our people who stood on the picket line at Wapping for more than a year and have since been forgotten.
The dimension of the unseen human tragedy was shocking. We had people who came with their families, their children; they wanted to take part in a peaceful demon-stration. They wanted to say to Murdoch, "You've not only done this to me, you've done it to my wife and kids." But the Metropolitan Police clearly had other instructions. They were there to protect the newspapers, to see that Murdoch got the Sun out, and the rest of his publications. We called them "paper boys", and that was exactly what they were.
'To achieve this, they acted in a most brutal way - as the subsequent inquiries confirmed. I saw many people deliber-ately beaten up by the so-called riot police. The journalists who came along were shocked by what they saw. The police went for decent, straightforward trade unionists as if it was a civil war situation. One of our people was killed by one of Murdoch's lorries, and the lorry didn't even bother to stop. There were several nervous breakdowns. Marriages broke up. Strong men I knew, and I don't mean physically strong, but men with leadership, turned bitter. It broke them. People entitled to unemployment benefit didn't receive it. I'm not only talking just about the relatively well paid, but cleaners, canteen workers, who outnumbered the printers four to one ? It was as if the British state had joined forces with Murdoch against us ?'
In the days and weeks that followed the 'dash for freedom', the television news showed surreal images of journalists alighting from Murdoch company buses. They queued to show the security guards their new identification cards, which described them ignominiously as 'consultants'. They passed through ten-foot electronically operated steel gates, set in spiked walls topped with coils of barbed razor wire. Several would try to run inside, squinting into searchlights that covered the perimeter of their new workplace. These were journalists on publications which, between them, commanded the greatest newspaper readership in the English language. They had been ordered to go to Wapping or be sacked. They were not consulted; and all their agreements with the management were dishonoured.
'I used to think how intimidated they looked,' said Dean. 'One always regarded the journalists as the thinking people; and if they'd thought for half a moment, they actually had a power that weekend they'd never had before. Without them, those newspapers would not have come out. Journalists lost a lot of their pride then, and their self-confidence. They came and went, with many having to lie face down on the floor of the coaches with the blinds drawn. It was not an image that sat comfortably with journalists when you read that there were others who risked their lives to get the story and tell the truth.'
Thirty-eight journalists refused to go to Wapping. Among the handful from the Sun was Eric Butler, a crusty sports sub-editor whose nickname was 'Scoop'. After forty-two years in Fleet Street, he was less than three years from retirement. 'I knew it meant the end of my career,' he said, 'but there was no alternative for me. What Murdoch did was industrial gangsterism; the people he sacked had given him loyal service and helped him make a lot of money. He offered the journalists ?2,000 to cross the picket line. For that they could keep their job, but not their self-respect.
'Ellen, my wife, took a call one night and it was one of my mates, who said, "Eric will change his mind, won't he?" and she said, "No he won't. More to the point, I don't want him to change his mind." I thought it was strange so many journalists were suddenly saying they had no time for the printers. Yes, we had our disagreements, but it was on both sides; they were blokes making a living just like us. There were a lot of good people among them. We had a great office football team: the journalists and the printers together. Then out of the blue my mates were saying they hated the printers. Did they? Or were they trying to excuse what they were doing?
'I stood on that picket line for a year, in freezing cold a lot of the time, and I watched my old mates go in and out in the coaches, and I never saw one of them again. And yet later on so many of them were disillusioned, or were kicked out by Murdoch. They'd served their purpose. It must have been sad for them.'
David Banks was assistant editor of the Sun at the time of Wapping. 'We lived on adrenaline', he said, 'and on defiance ? the defiance of the moment and the fact that the mob were at the gates, that it was us or them.' I asked him if he had lain on the floor of the coaches that took the scab journalists through the picket line. 'Oh, I did, I did ?' he replied. 'It wasn't pleasant. You knew the bottles and the bricks coming against the side of the coach were meant for you; and the fact that the driver then had to race through miles of darkened docklands, just to escape the anger. All of that had its effect ? After a while it dawned on me that I wasn't part of a cavalcade of knights on white horses: that there was a serious anti-social side to what I was doing. In the end, I decided on balance that, despite the fact that little people were being hurt, it was all worth while to save a great industry.'
Murdoch, who slept on a campbed at Wapping for almost two weeks, tried to engender the spirit of a 'crusade' against the infidels at the gates. Andrew Neil contributed to this by waving his champagne glass at the pickets, although in a television interview he compared the appearance of his new offices to that of 'a concentration camp'.
Sun journalists at first enjoyed a view of the Thames. This was soon closed down, apparently for security reasons, then there was no view at all. This hermetically sealed atmosphere contributed to what John Murray, Murdoch's 'personal counsellor', described as a 'certain mental uncertainty among the more sensitive members of the staff'.
Murray, an Australian and confidant of Murdoch, was flown to London to 'help with the transition'. I asked him about Murdoch's reputation for ruthlessness. 'Look,' he said, 'at that high level business principles can come across as ruthlessness. But let me give you another picture of the man. There was one day when a group of people were retiring - they hadn't been sacked, I hasten to add - and I asked Rupert to come down and say a few words to them. "Certainly, John," was his immediate reply. Well, he thanked them for their work and their contribution and when he was finished, one of the union leaders put his hand up and said, "Mr Murdoch, we know about your great kindness in looking after your chauffeur, who died recently, and I want to express on behalf of the unions, our appreciation for that." As he and I left the room, he said, "John, I've got a feeling they were surprised: that they don't really think I'm a kind man." ' In 1989, Murdoch disclosed that he was a born-again Christian. He said he foresaw a major religious revival in Britain in which his papers would play their part by maintaining 'high moral values'. |
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"Burn down the disco, hang the blessed dj, because the music that they constantly play,
it says nothing to me about my life..." The Smiths - 'Panic'
Last edited by Xavier on Mar-30-2003 at 06:34
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